Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda rejoins the Virtual Memories Show at Readercon 2014 to talk about the time Neil Gaiman tried to explain Twitter to him, his new project on the golden age of storytelling, what he dislikes about the tone of today's book reviewers, and more! [Also, we remastered our original Dirda podcast from 2012, over here!]
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 29 - Bookman's Holiday
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm Gil Roth and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show and find all our past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find those episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, VMSPod.com, or chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Well, folks, thanks for making it another record-breaking month for The Virtual Memories Show. We managed to beat June's huge numbers and we didn't even need the extra day in July to pull it off. Now, I think you can either credit or blame the show's pace of growth to the fact that this is really is a day focused sort of product. I mean, let's be honest, there are two constants with this show. It's got interviews and it's got books. It's not like all the guests are pimping new projects, although those can be pretty great. Sometimes it's just people talking about the books that they love. I bring it up because this weekend someone who knew about the podcast asked me if I'm in publishing. Now, I don't know whether my face betrayed my reaction, but I'm pretty sure I gave up the game when I said, "Oh my God, no, no, no!" I've talked about the envy factor before, or at least the road not taken factor when it comes to peeking into my guest's lives. Some of them, who knows, maybe they give up a longing, wistful look at my relative job security and home and library and dogs and all that, but I'm pretty sure none of them have ever said, "Man, I should have blown off a life in the arts or academia and been a trade magazine editor." I mean, maybe they did. Who knows? I'm really sure none of my recent guests have said, "Oh, man, I wish I'd launched a trade association in the bio-pharmaceutical field like Gil did." And the guy this weekend, I told him, "No, no, I'm not in publishing. I'm the president of a bio-pharmaceutical industry trade association. I just do this podcast on the side out of love." So that's what you get, love. This week's guest is really the first one who's the world I looked at and thought, "Man, I wish I had that life." He's Michael Durda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic. We recorded a long conversation way back in September 2012 and we reconnected this past July at ReaderCon to do a follow-up. Now the first time we recorded was at Mike's house and I just wouldn't, imagining the life that had allowed him to build up a library like that, that had made the library so instrumental to what he was doing and not just something you acquire from the goods of a completely unrelated job. Of course, the more we talked, the more reality intruded on the ideal. It's not easy making a living is a book critic nowadays and there are kids who have to go to college and a million other distractions and market imperatives to worry about. Still I've admired Durda's body of writing for decades and it was such a joy to see him in his home and then to be able to just sit down and get an idea of who he is and how he got there. The problem is, while I was prepping for this podcast in July, I tried to listen to that first one that we did and I was embarrassed to discover just how horrendous the audio quality was on that one. I can explain exactly why it's terrible but it's all technical stuff that's not going to matter to you. What's important is it was the October 2012 post that I did and it was god awful, huge hiss over everything because I was trying to amplify his voice, I didn't know how to get rid of background noise, it was a disaster and I posted that and it is one of the top five downloaded episodes of the show which means that if that's the first one that most people have listened to, I don't know how we ever built an audience, much less one that's breaking records month after month. Lucky for me, I held on to the original files from our conversation and I recently broke out a lot of tricks that I didn't know back in 2012, cleaned up the audio as best I could, did a round of edits and I just reposted it under the same file name. So if you've never heard that one before and you want to check out the first conversation that Michael and I recorded, you can find that on iTunes or at chimeraobscura.com/vm. The title of that one is The Correction of Taste. You can just search for durda otherwise, d-i-r-d-a. I've put a link to that, well, that remastered old one in the post for this episode so you don't have to go searching all over the place if you just go to our website. Anyway, here's a skinny. I drove up to Burlington Mass for ReaderCon, a literary fantasy and science fiction conference in July and I grabbed Mike on his way to the book dealer room and we sat down back in my hotel room to record a conversation about ReaderCon, his new book projects, favorite authors, how we still can't bring himself to college's library, generally an update from the past two years, see who he is and in some respects it was nice for me to have a little bit of a barometer for how the show is different in terms of how I can hold a conversation with someone. Anyway, here's Mike's bio. Michael Durda is a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post and he received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He's the author of the memoir, an open book, and of four collections of essays, readings, bound to please, book by book, and classics for pleasure. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for Best Critical Biographical Work of the Year. Michael Durda graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a PhD in comparative literature, medieval studies and European romanticism from Cornell University. He's a contributor to the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Online Barns and Noble Review, The American Spectator, and a whole bunch of other periodicals. He's also a frequent lecturer and occasional college teacher. And he is a wonderful writer with an infectious love of books. I recommend you keep his collections on hands, just in case you ever find your enthusiasm starting to flag. And now, the second virtual memories conversation with Michael Durda. Let's talk about book culture. Okay, books, books, books, read one, you read them all, that's my motto. And you have read them all, so that's the... Go back and read that same one over. There's a story in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love about the main character's uncle who's actually based on Nancy Mitford's father, who only read one book in his life. It was not called The Wild, it was the other one, White Fang. It was White Fang, he said it was such a good book, I've never bothered to read another one. Yes, one read one book, you read them all. I continue to work in book culture, in some ways being incalcitrant or old fashioned or just do set in my ways to really adopt to social media and the internet world. I have a son who also has my name, Michael, who's actually going to be doing social media stuff for the Chancellor of Berkeley. He's been working in PR, so I hope our... Has he browbeat you into anything yet? No, I mean, at one time, he tried to have me set up a website, and I got so far as to have it designed by a friend of his when he was in college. And somehow, we both dropped the ball, both the designer and me, and nothing ever came with it. I mean, sometimes I think it would be fun to have a place to dump my stuff, because I write for a number of different venues, and some people know about one, and some people know I write for the Washington Post, they don't know me, they write pretty often for the TLS or the New York Review books, and I say, "Well, if I could somehow gather together, that would be kind of useful, just for me, because I'm an unorganized person anyway." Yeah, how much of this reflects your own... Yeah, it was sort of my own desire to have more or less chaos in my life. On the other hand, I keep buying more books, and so I mean just adding to the chaos, and I'm here partly to buy old science fiction and fantasy books from the late 19th and early 20th century. So that's my... This project, I think I may have mentioned it to you in the past. You have the Golden Age of Story, you were talking about. Yeah, they were a great age of storytelling. I'm now signed a contract for it. You have? Yeah, I was kind of off, and I've got a year and a half to write this book, so I'm hoping it will all come together. It'll be a fun project, but I also have another book that will come out in between. I did these blogs for the American scholar, weekly essays, really, they didn't call them blogs. We were, in fact, more personal essays about a bookish life, so I've collected them as browsing, which is the name of the feature of the American scholars' home page, subtitled that a year of reading, collecting, and living with books, and it's kind of a portrait of a sort of a bookman's life for one year. Anyway, that's coming out in another next year with Pegasus and the process of negotiating that. There could be a hitch with it, but it should all go through some too all right, but so those are the two main projects in terms of my own far horizons, but otherwise I continue to write for the post and these other places. I think about books and what the future of books is all the time. What conclusions are you drawing? My conclusions are that I still maintain that the physical book has, possesses qualities that the screen will never have. Have you used an e-reader at all? I've never used an e-reader. I've looked at them. I mean, I don't think I've looked at a Facebook page. I'm not absolutely sure of that. And I remember you. I'll show you one when we wrap up. Some years ago I was sitting with a dinner with my friend, the science fiction fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, who had just started his Twitter account. No, he has like a zillion Twitter followers now and he wanted me to do something with it. Well, he would take a picture of him and say, "What is this Twitter stuff?" He says, "Well, basically it's just like, you know, birds on a line saying, "Hello, I'm here." And another one says, "Hello, hello, I'm here." And that was always my impression, but I gather Twitter has become much more than that and what everyone tells me, but, you know, being a Sherlockian, I've always been born in mind that famous opening and studying Scarlet where Holmes talks about the limited capacity of your mind, your brain addict. And I think if I spend too much time thinking about social media, I'm thinking about communicating to people what I'm doing or what I'm thinking, I will actually do less thinking, less doing. That may only be me. I spend a fair amount of time online anyway, doing email and writing on, on a computer, but I've resisted the impulse that comes and goes to become have greater presence online. I've found myself, I'm working on a short story now, and I've found by not going to my RSS reader, which was collating and collecting a million different feeds of things I like reading. I haven't done that for-- I see the RSS. I don't really know what RSS is. Yeah, I know. Anytime something new gets posted on a website, it ends up in this field. I know it all. It's all magic. And I haven't checked it for eight or nine days now, and I find that my mind is clearer. I'm writing better. I realized while I was pretending that going through these RSS feeds was productive, it was fake productive reading. It was really about getting numbers down to zero in all these different little feeds that I read everything in this feed and that feed. Yeah, there is that sense of just keeping up. Well, it's this constant noise that we have in our lives, and often useful noise, it's enjoyable noise, but I go out and I see people walking their dogs on when they're talking on their cell phones, or looking at their cell phones, and say when you're out walking your dog, you're supposed to be thinking great thoughts, or reviewing your life's major blunders, or having some moments along with yourself. And this seems to be something that we tend to draw on away from, the idea of being along with yourself. I gather there was some survey recently that people were asked to sit in the room all the past style, you know, for 15 minutes without doing anything, and they just go stir crazy and it started, I don't know, the whole details of the experiment. I just imagine generating into monkeys and throwing feces at the wall and stuff. Apparently, they said if you got bored, you could give yourself an electric shock. And people were just shocking, because they were so bored after 10 minutes, and this is sort of pathetic, I think. But the world of citizens is, and it seems to, we're going to have screens with us and people will adapt, and I know that kids who have grown up with computers, and one form of digital media or another, they're used to it, they will do fine. But the only thing that it tracks me about e-books, and as I get older, is that you can make the type of font bigger. Yeah, my wife's been doing that lately, reading late at night, she'll kind of bulk up the point size. I mean, when I write on a computer screen, I make the type really big, sometimes I forget to put it back to the wild point. I had a columnist like that, who, you know, people say, "What are you blind? What is this?" It's giant, you know, neon letters coming from the group. It feels like it's shouting at you, yeah. But I mean, I do, I have these fetishes, I do write big type font, and I also have very narrow margins. I don't use the full screen. I set it up so it looks like a newspaper column. Yeah. Lately, I find that I'm writing on paper rather than writing on screen, again, for this stuff that I'm working on. I just, something about having the computer going, I'm going to end up clicking on something or looking at something else, and, you know, this way, I just sit down with a notepad and start scribbling away and, you know, type it all up when it's at some point. I used to use an older laptop, which I didn't have an internet connection, and it was for the same reason that, you know, I knew it was just a typewriter, and I could not go and check things. I just write. Well, and I interviewed Lynn Ulman a few months ago, she said, when she and her husband were both working in the same, writing in the same apartment, they would turn off the router and they'd give each other their cell phones and hide them, so the other one didn't know where they were, so they wouldn't be able to check them for, I realized, we all had to have our rituals when it comes to this stuff, so. But as far as the actual quality of reading, you know, from a screen versus reading in print, you feel that it's still the physical thing. Well, yeah, I do. Screen's really encourage you to go fast. Sure. They want you to go from link to link or just absorb the information, and they're great research tools, computers, obviously, but when you read, you want to just kind of settle into the text. You don't want to be distracted from the text more than the ordinary distractions of life all the way they're going to be, whereas if you're on the computer, you're reading, "Well, I'll just check my email, I'll not come back to anybody." As you say, you go all over the place, so you lose the focus, and I think that to appreciate a work of art, or really just a very, really well done story, you do need to give it your full attention, and that attention is always being compromised when you're on a screen or often being compromised. The other aspects of books are magical, ideas, the special aura of the first edition. We know from Walter Benjamin's work of art and age of mechanical reproduction, the original has an aura that the fact similarly does not. The fact that you're reading a book that you could hold in your hands, and you could feel for animals and like to touch things, turning the pages as a pleasurable experience, seeing how you're progressing through the book and knowing how much more is there. The fact that books vary in the type sizes and qualities and cover designs, and they all make each book kind of unique as an experience, whereas there's a homogeneity to screen reading. Screen reading is fine if you're reading, well, it's always fine, but if you're solely reading for out of addiction, if you're a romance or mystery reader, you just want to crank your way through these books, well, fine. But if you want to read books and think about them or deal with them in some greater way, then you might want to consider meeting them in a proper book, as my friend John Cleveland called. That proper book will have to be a first edition as well. Well, have our standards, and what are you finding downstairs in the book selling room? Well, most of the books are newer books, but I do look for older things, and one guy who's there, Bob Eldridge, was the cataloger for Lloyd W. Curry, who's a premier dealer in modern firsts of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He worked there for 10 or 12 years, he's still in the same town, but he brings his own books and discards, I think, from Curry of lesser quality to reader con and occasionally to other conventions. So he brings what are older books, things from the late 19th or early 20th century obscure, half forgotten, or books that are just, you don't see very often. I put aside a number of books there, Marjorie Bowen's Black Magic, one of her early novels. She became an important writer of ghost stories, fantasy stories, and all sorts of things, very poetic, but in an early edition, but on the other hand, I mean, so I look at these books which are sort of still sort of pricey, anywhere from $30 up sometimes to $100, maybe we'd bring them, but I also look at paperback, so I bought a paperback Meet Me in Atlantis by John Jakes, a comic story, this is at another dealer's place, of stories about kind of Conan the Barbarian parody, pastiche character, and these comic adventures in Atlantis. I haven't read them, I'm told they're really funny. This is by John Jakes, who made it one of the right historical novels and he's very popular. I was assuming the same. And the other book I bought from him was what? Oh, an early Talbot Mundi book, or the Devil's Guard, I'm going to write about Talbot Mundi, who's best known these days, probably for King of the Kyber rifles, made into a movie, but who wrote a venture novel set in the Far East with British secret agents and like, and all sorts of empires, more even more Asian than those. And sometimes with Mahatmas, with strange powers, lost valleys, I love all that writer haggard lost world stuff, I mean, I did teach, I think, I don't know if I mentioned this when we spoke earlier, I taught a course at the University of Maryland on the adventure novel, this is two springs ago, two successive springs. One was the classic adventure novel, 1885 to 1915, and the next year was the modern adventure novel, 1917 to 1973, I think. The first one started with King Solomon's minds and included the time machine, the president of Zenda, the scholar of Pimprenel, the 39 steps, Tarzan of the Apes, so a book a week, so a lot of fun books, when the second began with one princess and ended with another. So it began with Agri-Spro as a princess of Mars and ended with William Goldman's The Princess Bride and with a lot of books in between, but I am interested in the adventure novel in what used to be called the romance, romance being unlike the novel dealing with fantastic elements and often being much more plot driven rather than character driven. And this aspect of fiction had been neglected through most of my growing up and study. It's coming back into favor now, and it's never gone out of favor, obviously in genre fiction, but people want story. And this is like thinking of this book, a great age of storytelling because you simply had a great proliferation of magazines with fiction available to every class because for the first time people could read, no matter what their backgrounds, and you didn't have the competition with radio and television and things like that yet. And it's a lot of fun, I keep using that word fun, which is not an adjective, I usually do. You fall into these texts and quirks sometimes. And you become self-conscious when there are two microphones on the table. No, that's all right, you know, do you find you're still making discoveries, authors or books? Or most things mythical and you've heard of author X and you just need to find the book or there are still guys who are, you know, really, are there people I've known of and sometimes I haven't read them or I've, and then when I do read them, I'm pleased to discover that they move up to their advanced booking or they proved to even better be better than I expected. I'm reading a biography now of Julian Hawthorne, who wrote a lot of commercial fiction during the late 19th century and also edited early anthologies of detective stories, lock and the key library, ten volumes of the volumes, but he wrote wonderful supernatural tales. One called Ken's Mystery is a vampire story, and there's another novel, a vampire kind of novel called Archibald Malmezon, and he's, you know, I've just, I'm reading this biography and I've read some of the stories and I'm looking forward to reading the novel. I actually brought them with me in case I have a chance to do some reading, which is unlikely. Yeah, see, I was smart enough on this trip to... The one thing a reader called that never happens is reading, you know. Now, what, so I mean, this is an example of, here's sort of semi-forgotten figure, but you discover and use, I've written an essay about William Hope Hudson for the Barnes and Noble Review, Hudson is one of the well-known names in Weird Tale, tradition in the Wheel Church, this should but not as well known as Lovecraft or Eltonon Blackwood, partly because he said a lot of his stories at sea, you know, to see as a young man. And he's also known for this incredibly difficult, sort of Finnegan's wake-like post-apocalyptic novel called The Nightland, which he wrote in a 17th century style, you know, Robert Burton or somebody, but it's still extremely powerful, and there's a sort of less, not a different plot, but in some elements from Leylen, which is more accessible to House on the Border Land, which is the name of this. Well, because the first Dungeons and Dragons module was The Keep on the Border Land, so that was our introduction back to order to fund the-- Exactly, so I've written a piece about them, so those are fun to read. So, you know, there are books that you keep your attuned to from the critics and people that you know, and when I write this book on The Great Age of Storytelling, I'll have a long acknowledgments list, because I've learned so much from people like Mike Ashley, John Clute, of the Lady F. Blyler, Estee Joshy, people who were Douglas Green for Detective Stories, who really know this material solid, who devoted their lives to it. I'm someone who is read it off and on, but I've had a lot of other interests along the line and along the way, and I'm happy to be guided in some respects by their greater knowledge and wisdom, and yet when I go to the books, I try to write my own reactions to them, and so this book will be somewhat personal, and I do like to write books that have a personal quality to them. Is there a sense of the providing the history and then a sort of personal interpretation of books? I know it's kind of a relief to ask what shape the book is going to be in, but I'm mulling over how I'm going to structure this book. It is too early to say, because I'm still doing a lot of reading for it. I plan to read through the summer and start writing, putting together a book in the fall and see what else I need to do. At one point, I thought I might structure it if I could work it properly, as a kind of autobiographical book. I would not want to be egregiously personal with it, but in non-Conan Doyle, I use the structure of my discovery of Arthur Conan Doyle's various books as the sort of thread that took us through this kind of his life and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street of characters, so that it helped organize the chapters and gave, I hope, a sense of a real person talking to other real people about stories and novels that mattered, that were important to him, and I would like to carry over that sort of Bookman's tone. People have described the Conan Doyle book particularly in some of my other essays being like Vincent Stera, who is now outside of the Baker Street of the Regulus, a forgotten figure as a Chicago Bookman, but someone who did write with a very personal tone about the books that he encountered in his collecting and reading. I think that's important, because a lot of times we read the two critics today who have these sort of Olympian approaches to books, or they don't bring enough of their own sort of subject of the judge bench, then. Yeah, they're setting themselves up too much as judges, and then the like. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to err by having too much of his sort of casual blogger tone that you find online, somewhat I do look a little bit online, so I know about that. And so it's a question of balance, and if it doesn't work, I'd probably start off trying it, I would abandon it and figure out another way to do it, but getting the tone right of a book seems to me really, or an essay, is really the key to everything, because if you set off with sounding long, or you never get caught up again, it just doesn't work. So, I used to fiddle with a long time, still do, with the opening, graphs, the hooks, of anything I wrote, getting that the sound of the sentence, or the quite the right register of voice that I wanted to convey. Sometimes you do things you want to sound more authoritative, because it's a scholarly book. Other times you want to sound really folksy, personal, it depends on the book. And finding that the right match is sometimes instinctive, but sometimes trial now. Do you fight yourself going back and killing your darlings? Oh, I mean, yeah, kill a lot of things. Yeah, I'm right laboriously, but doggedly. But I have an idea in my head what I want it to sound like, and when I finish a review, sometimes they're always too long. I'm limited for, at least it was just stayed with the post, the other places doesn't matter. The 1200 words. And I always write more. So I go back, and I thought this sort of Elmore Leonard point of view, I'm going to cut out everything that's boring, or at least it seems boring. I mean, some of my readers may say this judge was boring, that's not. And so I'll go back and I'll often trim out more of myself to give more room for a author's quotes, or what have you. And I know I have certain bad habits whenever I fall into listing things, I always list too many things. That usually fail after the third item. I know all this like four or five, and you lose people, you really don't need to list anything more often more than two, sometimes three, and you just have to go back and there's where you often kill your darlings because sometimes you have wonderful quotes that you want to use, or wonderful points, and you just got to leave something out. And being a professional, you have to just look at your stuff with a cold eye and know that you can't get more than 1200 words, and so you're going to use the ones you have as well as you can. The odd thing, of course, is after you have cut something down, maybe it was originally 1400 words. And I decided it's probably better, more often than not, but you know, I still like writing the reviews. I've been doing essays for TLS, I've enjoyed doing those, probably what I've done once a month now, maybe a little bit more. And those are also the sort of bookish life, and most recent ones about to come out in the week or so. It's about to my tendency to fall asleep while I read now, the spirit is willing to flesh this week, and I sit down and chair for any amount of time, I'll start to fall asleep over my book. Bruce got 3,500 pages out of that, come on, he was awake, he was just lying in bed. But remembering falling asleep, but it took him a long time to fall asleep. Unfortunately, it takes me no time at all, your eyes are getting heavy. And as I say, it's one thing to fall asleep over Gower's Confessio Amontis, but it's another thing to fall asleep over attack of the Mantis. But it's a funny piece, and so I write these occasionally. You know, there's also getting older, and I think, yeah, I should really be calling books more. That was part of my, well, when we spoke two years ago, I was having a library built in my house, and I knew I was going to be somewhat limited in a shelf space. And my version of a midlife crisis was looking over the books and deciding which ones I was either never going to get to or never going to reread. I came out to about six or seven stacks that I took to a used bookstore and managed to trade in. Do you do you cull with any, any frequency and you cull ideologically like that with this whole idea of this is a book I've actually read on the past, I wrote entire essays about how to weed your collection. Yeah. I, of course, never follow. Yeah. I was going to ask. Did you actually do it yourself? I do get rid of a lot of review copies that get sent to my house. As I work from home now, publishers have found out my home address, so they send me books. And sometimes out of 10, they send me things on Homeland Security or Social Security reform or foreign affairs, things I never reviewed. Because you're at the Washington Post. Yeah. Therefore. Yeah. So to those that will take to the library and give or sometimes take to a bookstore and take credit in exchange so that there's still books coming out of this, even it's not, you know, it seems more fair rather than taking cash. But the books I own, the problem is, at one point, I thought these books would be worth enough money that my kids could sell them when I was dead and gone and make some, you know, get a little bundle out of them. But I realize that most of the books I own aren't worth anything anymore. Yeah. 90% of the books I own are worth less than I paid for. You were an economics major at one point in college. Yeah. And apparently you were not good at economics, but a good writer, which bumped you in the right direction. Yeah. This may be an example of how that didn't work out for you. So, I mean, I have, for example, a whole library of James Joyce, secondary stuff. Yeah. Probably 200 books about James Joyce. And it's a wonderful library, but I, you know, I don't know what to do with it. I've written half a dozen times or more about Joyce. In fact, I wrote about them again this year about a new book about the legal troubles, the publication of the book. I keep saying, I've got to stop writing about James Joyce. I'm done with Joyce, you know, unless I write a book about Joyce and it's already enough books about Joyce. I don't need all these secondary texts, but I would get pennies for them if I took them and it breaks my heart because I paid too much for them initially. And I think there must be some way I could, uh, could turn over some, you know, retirement money out of this stuff. And people say, we'll sell them on eBay. Yeah. And I think, well, ah, eBay, we're going to have to take pictures of them. Pack each one individually and then I've got to get mailers and buy a packing material and I've got to weigh them or go to the post office. I don't have time to do all that. I've tried to get my children who are now in their, I've sons in their 20s. I said, look, you could have all these books. Just go and sell them. You can keep the money. Just sell them for a reasonable amount on eBay. You'd work on eBay. Yeah. No, no, they'd rather just say dad, you know, let me, let me 20 dollars. But um, so, so they pile up and there, there are a lot of books I would readily part with if I felt that I wasn't, you know, just shooting myself in the foot in terms of all the money invested and buying them, putting them in storage units, keeping them in the house. The sunk cost fallacy. Yeah, I know that once I got rid of them, I would probably be happier. My friend Clute, John Clute is a eminent science fiction and fantasy critic and he's always calling his books. He has thousands of books, but he says if you, quite rightly enough, if you can't find them, what's the point of having them? So he only has books that he has on his shelf that you can not double-shelled either. You can just, he can go to and pull out. He has lots of shelves, plus he bought a special underground library and he's got another place in Maine. So he's, he's got, I just don't have the space. It would be like Don DeMasso over in Rhode Island with his enormous, enormous collection. I have to sit down with him someday to find out when that all began and, and well, he's, he's incredible. I mean, I admire I, he reads a novel a day, watches the movie a day. Yeah. This Facebook updates, they're pretty, pretty prolific, I mean, I, I, I, I can't, you know, I move my lips while I read, it makes me forever to read, you know, a short story. I, I, I, I really should never have gone into book review and I don't have the right qualities for I can't read fast, I read slow, I write slow, I mean, I, all I am is, I do love books and I'm dogged about it, you know, I do, do, do, I'd rather, you know, be involved with them and then pretty much do anything else. And as I've said before, you know, it's, it may sound pathetic, but the happiest hours of my life are spent sitting at my desk writing essays and reviews, so you think of it, Arthur? Do I have a favorite author and lots of authors I like? Years ago in my other life, I wrote my dissertation on French writer Stondal and Stondal I would often say was my favorite writer and he's certainly one of my favorite writers. There's something about, well, people are divided, they're Stondalians and Bailey's and the Stondalians are the ones who love the novels, Ston, Red and the Black, Charles Apama. The Bailey's are the people who likes the personal writing, you have an autobiography called "The Life of Henry Bernard" or lots of travel books, lots of non-fiction, I'm a Bailey's. And there's something about his tone, it's sort of world-weary, it's cynical, but also very romantic, always falling in love with one beautiful woman after another who rejects him, you know, but always hopeful, occasionally successful with women, but basically he, there's something about his self-awareness of his own faults and good qualities and his interactions with the world, it appeals to me, it's a kind of personality I wish I had more of and had to some degree, you know, I'd really like to be a kind of, really like to be a riverboat gambler, I mean that was really what I liked to have done, or that or, you know, Captain Blood, Harold Flynn, you know, but I had to wear glasses, you know, it just didn't work, you know, I knocked my glasses off in a sword fight, that would be it, but so Stondal's a favorite, Thoreau was always a favorite when I was growing up, I learned a lot about writing from Thoreau, I think he writes wonderful sentences and very, you know, declarative sentences basically, but strong, strong on nouns and, you know, sturdy, oak-like prose that appealed to me, the English critic reviewer Cyril Connolly was also important to me, he also has a kind of personal voice and everything he writes, and he's known for being self-pitying and all writers are sort of, you know, can identify with that, but the, I think, and he was described by Kenneth Clark, who was his classmate, who had eaten in Oxford as the best prose writer of his generation, Clark's here, of course his friend and rival, Evelyn Waugh would dispute that, and Waugh is also a favorite of mine, particularly in Waugh's prose, and then for nonfiction of Flannel Brian, who, Miles Nagopoldine, who wrote newspaper columns, is the best of Miles, I think he's just a wonderful writer, he just cracks me up, and this is sort of Irish humor that is really a wonderful ear for the way people speak, so there are lots of writers that I like, and I would be hard put to choose any of them over the others, but fortunately we don't have to, I did ask, but that's okay, but I mean, I'm going to just give you, I'm just thinking about others, I mean, okay, my favorite poet is probably both layer, and in their books I go back to, the book I probably use the most is "Rojeis de Sares", and it's actually, it's actually the Oxford American Writers de Sares, which I contributed to, they, it's a dictionary style of de Sares, and they asked nine, ten writers from different backgrounds to contribute to little essays about favorite words, and I was one of the people, and others were quite celebrated writers like Zady Smith and David Foster Wallace and the like, but it's nice, it's a, I like the Sares itself, and I'm always trying to figure out why I keep saying the same words over again, and figuring out different ways to make the prose interesting, a little more vitality to it, there's a tendency I find it to be more too placid, in the kind of writing I do as I got in older words, but I can, I can, I can, I need to, I sometimes feel need to, the challenge is a little more of a jolt, okay, yeah, maybe it's because I, you know, I do, I do try to come at things from different angles to keep it fresh, but there is a tendency to know that you can do it, and to fall back on the usual ways that you do write, and he's a friend of mine used to saying, we'd never take his math tests when we were kids, you could, you would always get F's because he would never do his homework and do his things, but you know, we would score perfectly, 800's on his all these math exams stuff, and I said, well Tom, why don't you ever do your math? He says, well, if you can do it, why do it? And there's something to it. Author or work you regret not having read yet? Oh, this will be the last question because I know you've got to be able to get to. Yeah, I'll have to go downstairs to the book or on the course. Author I regret I haven't read yet. I've been told about science fiction and fantasy writing, Marcel Thoreau, I'm supposed to read, he's supposed to be really good. But those I haven't read, but I wish I had read. There's so many of those. I do read a lot, but I mean, I interviewed a professor, a literature professor, who was dying a few months ago, and he admitted he'd never read Anna Karenina at this point. Oh, you mean a good classic? Or just, you know, something that you know, you know, wow, I really wish I'd gotten around to this, and I really have to make the time. Well, there are a couple of there, and I've always, I've always badmouthed the fairy queen, because I've, you know, only read, you know, the first, you know, 25 pages of it, and I could not get into it. But I've felt, you know, I must have, I've failed the book in some ways. Yes, Lewis, and many other people loved it and filled with stories. And I know about it. And I think I should go back to that. And for years, I've talked about how I wanted to read Clarissa, and I've never read Clarissa yet. Then the, the other one is the, the Chinese five part, the story of the stone. I've always meant to read that. I love the tale of Genji when I finally read that some kind of 15 years ago, Japanese, very long, pristine novel. So they're, they're, they're not obvious classics unnecessarily. Oh, you know, they're, but we all have, you know, incredible gaps. I've never read a portrait of a lady by Henry James. Same here. I've read a lot of Henry James, but somehow I've never read a portrait of a lady. So I've that to look forward to. My colleague, John Yarley, was, was only, only recently read himself, and he was telling me how wonderful it was. And so I had a treat in store. I feel so bad about myself. Now this is great. I figured everybody smart. And, you know, but yeah, but, you know, and I've read a lot of things that other people haven't read or probably wouldn't want to read. And, but interest me, I, my, my aim always has been to, to champion things that have been overlooked or neglected or otherwise. It have given the attention. I think they deserve. Do you have a recent suggestion and not a recently published one, but when you've come across, when we spoke two years ago, you, and I followed you up on this, you really were pushing the Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, which I read about a month later. And oh my God, what an amazingly good book it is. No, that is a wonderful book. I taught that book and you should teach Lolita and the Good Soldier, the two books I used teach wise, teach novels. Interesting. But English novels anyway. What would I suggest now? It is reader cons if you want to limit to SF and fantasy, feel free. But let me think for a second. Usually, you know, I, when I think about science fiction, people haven't read science fiction. I generally recommend the stars by destination now for Bester, which is kind of the kind of money Christo set in space. Bester was once, well, like everyone, well known or not, but it was well known isn't anymore, as he should be. But the fantasy novel I've read in the last few years that I'm very fond of and is Blood in the Mist by Hope Merley's. And it's a most fantasy has young heroes and heroines. But Lud in the Mist has middle aged heroes. I like it already. It's a and as children are in it, but it's about a town lives on the edge of fairy land and doesn't communicate with fairy land because of their sort of fairy fruits that used to be involved in their culture, but seem to cause all sorts of problems in the rising, giving people emotional reactions and being just too, too much for this very placid little village that the people live in. And things start to happen and they have to have intercourse or relations with fairy land. But it's, it's really beautifully written. And the, the, the fact that it doesn't have the expected kind of heroes is, is, I think, really neat. And it is, it is, in fact, a favorite of Neil Gaiman's as well has written an introduction to one of the editions of the book. It's the only thing that Hope Merley's really, really wrote. She wrote some other stuff, but nobody reads them. So that's, that's a terrific book. And oh, I don't know. I mean, my mind is, it's overwhelmed sometimes when people ask these questions about, you know, what did you like to, you know, my, my, my, my critics would say, he said speak well, he likes everything. But I do try to write about books that I generally like and just have cabbles or whatever, or see reservations. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's so much out there. But I, you know, what I love about reader con is that you do learn about the new books that are coming out and have a chance to look at some of the old books that you might have overlooked in the past. Sounds tremendous. I will let you get down to the booksellers. In fact, I'll head down and look for Let in the Mist. Okay. Michael Derta, thanks so much for coming on the virtual membership. Thank you. It was a great pleasure as always. And that was Michael Derta. As you can guess from the conversation, he does not have a web page. He is not on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or Snapchat or anything else. So you should look him up online and you'll be able to find some of his reviews and essays that way. But if I were you, I'd go buy his memoir and especially his essay collections. I'm partial to bound to please and readings. I've got multiple copies of those in my house, like on my nightstand down in my library, just so I can open them up whenever I feel like it and dive in. If you're between books, just pick up one of his collections of reviews or appreciations as they're known. And you'll, you'll just find yourself discovering a whole new world of books you didn't know about. Thank you for listening to this week's virtual memory show. I really appreciate you coming around for this one as well as going back to check out the earlier Michael Derta interview, the correction of taste. We'll be back next Tuesday with a conversation with Jessa Crispin, the founder of the online book review magazine, book slot. I thought it'd be kind of neat to jump from, from Bookman to book slot like that. And there's some interesting parallels between their careers, even though they came up at such different times and work in such different models. Anyway, that'll be up next Tuesday. I hope you're around to check that out. You can subscribe to the virtual memories show on iTunes and you can visit our websites, VMS pod.com, or chimera obscura.com slash VM to find all our past episodes and make a donation to this ad free podcast. I appreciate any financial support you can offer. As I've told you guys before, I run this show out of pocket. Like I said, I'm not in publishing. I'm the president of a pharmaceutical industry trade association. This is something I do out of love. But if you're willing to show a little monetary value for it, I would appreciate it greatly. I'll even send you a short story that I wrote if you'd like to get something back. And if you do hit up the show on iTunes, do me a favor, leave a review and a rating of the show, at least a rating. But it helps if you write a little text about the whole thing. I'd really appreciate the feedback. Until next time, you've been listening to the virtual memory show and I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]